Translating Picturebooks examines the role of illustration in the translation process of picturebooks and how the word-image interplay inherent in the medium can have an impact both on translation practice and the reading process itself. The book draws on a wide range of picturebooks published and translated in a number of languages to demonstrate the myriad ways in which information and meaning is conveyed in the translation of multimodal material and in turn, the impact of these interactions on the readers’ experiences of these books. The volume also analyzes strategies translators employ in translating picturebooks, including issues surrounding culturally-specific references and visual and verbal gaps, and features a chapter with excerpts from translators’ diaries written during the process. Highlighting the complex dynamics at work in the translation process of picturebooks and their implications for research on translation studies and multimodal material, this book is an indispensable resource for students and researchers in translation studies, multimodality, and children’s literature.

Children's publishing is a huge international industry and there is ever-growing interest from researchers and students in the genre as cultural object of study and tool for education and socialization.

Translating for Children is not a book on translations of children's literature, but a book on translating for children. It concentrates on human action in translation and focuses on the translator, the translation process, and translating for children, in particular. Translators bring to the translation their cultural heritage, their reading experience, and in the case of children's books, their image of childhood and their own child image. In so doing, they enter into a dialogic relationship that ultimately involves readers, the author, the illustrator, the translator, and the publisher. What makes Translating for Children unique is the special attention it pays to issues like the illustrations of stories, the performance (like reading aloud) of the books in translation, and the problem of adaptation. It demonstrates how translation and its context takes precedence can take over efforts to discover and reproduce the original author's intentions. Rather than the authority of the author, the book concentrates on the intentions of the readers of a book in translation, both the translator and the target-language readers.

Children's classics from Alice in Wonderland to the works of Astrid Lindgren, Roald Dahl, J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman are now generally recognized as literary achievements that from a translator's point of view are no less demanding than 'serious' (adult) literature. This volume attempts to explore the various challenges posed by the translation of children's literature and at the same time highlight some of the strategies that translators can and do follow when facing these challenges. A variety of translation theories and concepts are put to critical use, including Even-Zohar's polysystem theory, Toury's concept of norms, Venuti's views on foreignizing and domesticating translations and on the translator's (in)visibility, and Chesterman's prototypical approach. Topics include the ethics of translating for children, the importance of child(hood) images, the 'revelation' of the translator in prefaces, the role of translated children's books in the establishment of literary canons, the status of translations in the former East Germany; questions of taboo and censorship in the translation of adolescent novels, the collision of norms in different translations of a Swedish children's classic, the handling of 'cultural intertextuality' in the Spanish translations of contemporary British fantasy books, strategies for translating cultural markers such as juvenile expressions, functional shifts caused by different translation strategies dealing with character names, and complex translation strategies used in dealing with the dual audience in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales and in Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories.